Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when America and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry.

Most modern anti-communists reject the concept of historical materialism, which is a central idea in Marxism. Anti-communists reject the Marxist belief that capitalism will be followed by socialism and communism, just as feudalism was followed by capitalism. Anti-communists question the validity of the Marxist claim that the socialist state will "wither away" when it becomes unnecessary in a true communist society. Anti-communists also accuse communists of having caused several famines that occurred in 20th-century communist states, such as the Russian Famine of 1921 and the much more severe famine in China during the Great Leap Forward.

Some anti-communists refer to both communism and fascism as totalitarianism, seeing similarity between the actions of communist and fascist governments.[1]

Opponents argue that communist parties that have come to power have tended to be rigidly intolerant of political opposition. Communist governments have also been accused of creating a new ruling class (a Nomenklatura), with powers and privileges greater than those previously enjoyed by the upper classes in the non-communist regimes.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin debated with Karl Marx in the First International, arguing that the Marxist state is another form of oppression.[5] He loathed the idea of a vanguard party ruling the masses from above. Anarchists initially participated in, and rejoiced over, the 1917 revolution as an example of workers taking power for themselves. However, after the October revolution, it became evident that the Bolsheviks and the anarchists had very different ideas. Anarchist Emma Goldman, deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, was initially enthusiastic about the revolution, but was left sorely disappointed, and began to write her book My Disillusionment in Russia. Anarchist Peter Kropotkin, proffered trenchant criticism of the emergent Bolshevik bureaucracy in letters to Vladimir Lenin, noting in 1920: "[a party dictatorship] is positively harmful for the building of a new socialist system. What is needed is local construction by local forces … Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name."[6] Many anarchists fought against Russian, Spanish and Greek Communists; many were killed by them, such as Lev Chernyi, Camillo Berneri and Constantinos Speras.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx lays out a 10-point plan advising the redistribution of land and production, and Ludwig von Mises argues that the initial and ongoing forms of redistribution constitute direct coercion.[7][8] Neither Marx's 10-point plan nor the rest of the manifesto say anything about who has the right to carry out the plan.[9]Milton Friedman argued that the absence of voluntary economic activity makes it too easy for repressive political leaders to grant themselves coercive powers. Friedman's view was also shared by Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, both of whom believed that capitalism is vital for freedom to survive and thrive.[10][11]

Objectivists who follow Ayn Rand are strongly anti-Communist.[12] They argue that wealth (or any other human value) is the creation of individual minds, that human nature requires motivation by personal incentive, and therefore, that only political and economic freedom are consistent with human prosperity. This is demonstrated, they believe, by the comparative prosperity of free market and socialist economies. Objectivist Ayn Rand writes that communist leaders typically claim to work for the common good, but many or all of them have been corrupt and totalitarian.[13]

Fascism is often considered a reaction to communist and socialist uprisings in Europe.[23] Italian fascism, founded and led by Benito Mussolini, took power after years of leftist unrest led many conservatives to fear that a communist revolution was inevitable. Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in the early 1920s the Nazis were only one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis came to dominance in the Great Depression, when they organized street battles against German Communist formations. When Hitler came to power in 1933 his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels set up the "Anti-Komintern." It generated masses of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, with the goal of demonizing Bolshevism and the Soviet Union to a worldwide audience.[24]

Most exiled Russian aristocrats as well as exiled Russian liberals were actively anti-Communist in the 1920s and 1930s.[25]

In Britain anticommunism was widespread among the British foreign policy elite in the 1930s with its strong upper-class connections.[26] The upper class the Cliveden set was strongly anti-Communist in Britain.[27]

Thích Huyền Quang was a prominent VietnameseBuddhist monk and anti-communist dissident. In 1977, Huyền Quang wrote a letter to Prime MinisterPhạm Văn Đồng detailing counts of oppression by the Communist regime.[28] For this, he and five other senior monks were arrested and detained.[28] In 1982, Huyền Quang was arrested and subsequently put into permanent house arrest for opposition to government policy after publicly denouncing the establishment of the state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Church.[29]Thích Quảng Độ is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and anti-communist dissident. In January 2008, the Europe-based magazine A Different View chose Ven. Thích Quảng Độ as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy.

The Catholic Church has a history of anti-communism. The most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "The Catholic Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with 'communism'. … Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds … [Still,] reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended."[30]

From 1945 onward the Australian Labor Party (ALP) leadership accepted the assistance of an anti-Communist Roman Catholic movement, led by B.A. Santamaria to oppose alleged communist subversion of Australian trade unions, of which Catholics were an important traditional support base. Bert Cremean, Deputy Leader of State Parliamentary Labor Party and Santamaria, met with Labor's political and industrial leaders to discuss the movements assisting their opposition to what they alleged was communist subversion of Australian trade unionism.[33] To oppose communist infiltration of unions Industrial Groups were formed. The groups were active from 1945 to 1954, with the knowledge and support of the ALP leadership.[34] until after Labor's loss of the 1954 election, when federal leader Dr H. V. Evatt, in the context of his response to the Petrov affair, blamed "subversive" activities of the "Groupers", for the defeat. After bitter public dispute many Groupers (including most members of the New South Wales and Victorian state executives and most Victorian Labor branches) were expelled from the ALP and formed the Democratic Labor Party (historical). In an attempt to force the ALP reform and remove alleged communist influence, with a view to then rejoining the "purged" ALP, the DLP preferenced (see Australian electoral system) the Liberal Party of Australia, enabling them to remain in power for over two decades. The strategy was unsuccessful, and after the Whitlam Government during the 1970s, the majority of the DLP decided to wind up the party in 1978, although a small Federal and State party continued based in Victoria (see Democratic Labour Party) with state parties reformed in NSW and Queensland in 2008.

After the Soviet occupation of Hungary during the final stages of the Second World War, many clerics were arrested. The case of the ArchbishopJózsef Mindszenty of Esztergom, head of the Catholic Church in Hungary was the most known. He was accused of treason to the communist ideas and was sent to trials and tortured during several years between 1949 and 1956. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against communism he was set free and after the failure of the movement he was forced to move to the United States' embassy on Budapest. There he lived until 1971 when the Vatican and the communist government of Hungary pacted his way out to Austria. In the following years Mindszenty travelled all over the world visiting the Hungarian colonies in Canada, United States, Germany, Austria, South Africa and Venezuela. He led a high critical campaign against the communist regime denouncing the atrocities committed by them against him and the Hungarian people. The communist government accused him and demanded that the Vatican remove him the title of Archbishop of Esztergom and forbid him to make public speeches against communism. The Vatican eventually annulled the excommunication imposed on his political opponents, and stripped him of his titles. The Pope, who declared the Archdiocese of Esztergom officially vacated, refused to fill the seat while Mindszenty was still alive.[35]

Falun Gong practitioners are against the Communist Party of China's persecution of Falun Gong. In April 1999, over ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered at Communist Party of China headquarters, Zhongnanhai, in a silent protest following an incident in Tianjin.[36][37][38] Two months later the communist party banned the practice, initiated a security crackdown, and began a propaganda campaign against it.[39][40][41] Since 1999, Falun Gong practitioners in China have been subject to torture,[39] arbitrary imprisonment,[42] beatings, forced labor, organ harvesting,[43] and psychiatric abuses.[44][45] Falun Gong responded with their own media campaign, and have emerged as a notable voice of dissent against the Communist Party of China, by founding organizations such as the Epoch Times, NTDTV and others that criticize the communist party.[46]

Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet-bloc; individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s. This grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as follows: "I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it."

On November 17, 1989, a Friday, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from November 19 to late December. By November 20 the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swollen from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on November 27. In June 1990 Czechoslovakia held its first democraticelections since 1946.

Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Kuomintang was ruling China and strongly opposed the Communist Party of China, causing the Chinese Civil War. Kuomintang lost the war and exiled in Taiwan, while the rest of China became communist in 1949.

Lenin saw Poland as the bridge which the Red Army would have to cross in order to assist the other communist movements and help bring about other European revolutions. Poland was the first country which successfully stopped a communist military advance. Between February 1919 and March 1921, Poland's successful defence of its independence was known as the Polish–Soviet War. According to American sociologist Alexander Gella, "the Polish victory had gained twenty years of independence not only for Poland, but at least for an entire central part of Europe."[81]

After the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the first Polish uprising during World War II was against the Soviets. The Czortków Uprising occurred during January 21–22, 1940, in the Soviet-occupied Podolia. Teenagers from local high schools stormed the local Red Army barracks and a prison, in order to release Polish soldiers who had been imprisoned there.[82]

The Polish 1970 protests (Polish: Grudzień 1970) were anti-Comintern protests which occurred in northern Poland in December 1970. The protests were sparked by a sudden increase in the prices of food and other everyday items. As a result of the riots, brutally put down by the Polish People's Army and the Citizen's Militia, at least 42 people were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded.

Polish anti-communist university students.

Solidarity was an anti-communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. In the 1980s, it constituted a broad anti-communist movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s, and several years of repression, however, in the end, it had to start negotiating with the union. The Round Table Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed, and in December 1990, Wałęsa was elected President of Poland. Since then, it has become a more traditional trade union.

The Romanian anti-communist resistance movement lasted between 1948 and the early 1960s. Armed resistance was the first and most structured form of resistance against the communist regime. It was not until the overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu in late 1989 that details about what was called "anti-communist armed resistance" were made public. It was only then that the public learned about the numerous small groups of "haiducs" who had taken refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, where some resisted for ten years against the troops of the Securitate. The last "haiduc" was killed in the mountains of Banat in 1962. The Romanian resistance was one of the longest lasting armed movement in the former Soviet bloc.[86]

The first major manifestation of anti-communism in the United States occurred in 1919 and 1920, during the First Red Scare, led by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. During the Red Scare, the Lusk Committee investigated those suspected of sedition, and many laws were passed in the US that sanctioned the firings of Communists. First came the Hatch Act of 1939 which was sponsored by Carl Hatch of New Mexico. This law attempted to drive Communism out of public work places. The Hatch Act outlawed the hiring of federal workers who advocated the "overthrow of our Constitutional form of government". This phrase was specifically directed at the Communist Party. Later in the spring of 1941 another anti-communist law, Public Law 135, was passed. This law sanctioned the investigation of any federal worker suspected of being communist and the firing of any communist worker.[92]

Catholics often took the lead in fighting Communism in America.[93] Pat Scanlan (1894-1983) was the managing editor (1917-1968) of the Brooklyn Tablet, the official paper of the Brooklyn diocese. He was a leader in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan, and in favor of the work of the National Legion of Decency in minimizing sexuality in Hollywood films.[94] Historian Richard Powers says Scanlan emerged in the 1920s:

as the leading spokesman for an especially pugnacious brand of militant Catholic anti-communism, that of Irish-Americans who, after suffering from 100 years of anti-Catholic prejudice in America, reacted to any criticism of the Church as a bigoted attack on their own hard-won status in American society....He combined a vivid writing style filled with Menckenesque invective, with an unbridled love of controversy. Under Scanlan, the Tablet became the national voice of Irish Catholic anti-communism – and a thorn in the side of New York's Protestants and Jews.[95]

Following World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, many anti-communists in the United States feared that Communism would triumph throughout the entire world and eventually be a direct threat to the U.S. There were fears that the Soviet Union and its allies such as People's Republic of China were using their power to forcibly take countries into Communist rule. Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya and Indonesia were seen as evidence of this. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO was a military alliance of Western Europe, led by the United States, to halt further Communist expansion in terms of the containment strategy.

The deepening of the Cold War in the 1950s saw a dramatic increase in anti-communism in the United States, including the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism. Thousands of Americans, such as the filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, were accused of being Communists or sympathizers, and many became the subject of aggressive investigations by government committees such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a result of sometimes vastly exaggerated accusations, many of the accused lost their jobs and became blacklisted, although most of these verdicts were later overturned. This was also the period of the McCarran Internal Security Act and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial. After the collapse of the Soviet Union many records were made public that in fact verified that many of those thought to be falsely accused for political purposes were in fact Communist spies or sympathizers (see Venona Project).

The US government usually argued its anti-communist policies by citing the human rights record of communist states, most notably the Soviet Union during the Joseph Stalin era, Maoist China, North Korea, and the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge government and the pro-HanoiPeople's Republic of Kampuchea in Cambodia. During the 1980s, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was particularly influential in American politics; it advocated US support of anti-communist governments around the world, including authoritarian regimes. In support of the Reagan Doctrine and other anti-communist foreign and defense policies, prominent U.S. and Western anti-communists warned that the U.S. needed to avoid repeating the West's perceived mistakes of appeasement of Nazi Germany.[96]

In one of the most prominent anti-communist speeches of any U.S. President, Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and anti-communist intellectuals prominently defended the label. In 1987, for instance, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Michael Johns of the Heritage Foundation cited 208 perceived acts of evil by the Soviets since the revolution.[97][98]

Anti-communism became significantly muted after the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc Communist governments in Europe between 1989 and 1991; the fear of a worldwide Communist takeover was no longer a serious concern. Remnants of anti-communism remain, however, in US foreign policy toward Cuba and North Korea. In the case of Cuba, the US only recently began to terminate its economic sanctions against the country. Tensions with North Korea have heightened as the result of reports that it is stockpiling nuclear weapons, and the assertion that it is willing to sell its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology to any group willing to pay a high enough price. Ideological restrictions on naturalization in U.S. law remain in effect, affecting prospective immigrants who were at one time members of a Communist party.

Since the September 11 attacks on the US and the subsequent Patriot Act, overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law and strongly supported by President George W. Bush, some communist groups in the US have faced renewed anti-communism by the government. On September 24, 2010, over 70 FBI agents simultaneously raided homes and served subpoenas to prominent antiwar and international solidarity activists thought to be members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, and Grand Rapids, MI, and visited and attempted to question activists in Milwaukee, WI, Durham, NC, and San Jose, CA. The search warrants and subpoenas indicated that the FBI was looking for evidence related to the "material support of terrorism".[99] In the process of raiding an activist's home, FBI agents accidentally left behind a file of secret FBI documents showing that the raids were aimed at people who were or were suspected of being members of the FRSO. The documents revealed a series of questions that agents would ask activists regarding their involvement in the FRSO and their international solidarity work related to Colombia and Palestine.[100] Later, members of the newly formed Committee to Stop FBI Repression held a press conference in Minnesota revealing that the FBI had placed an informant inside the FRSO to gather information prior to the raids.[101]

The events in Indonesia of 1965 and 1966, described as "one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century",[102] constituted a long period of state-supported anti-communist massacres in Indonesia. Perhaps over a million people were savagely killed, hundreds of thousands ended up in jails or were exiled, and the PKI (Indonesian communist party) was effectively eliminated. No one was ever prosecuted.[103]

^"The OMRI annual survey of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 1995", ISBN 1-56324-924-3, 1996, pp. 149–150, the text of the introductory provisions of the law, translated from the Official Journal of the Republic of Albania, no. 21, September 1995, pp. 923–924

Kennan, George F. (1964). On Dealing with the Communist World, in series, The Elihu Root Lectures. New York: Harper & Row. xi, 57 p. N.B.: Also on t.p.: "Published for the Council on Foreign Relations".